Identidades in English No 4, December 2014 | Page 49

President Domingo Sarmiento, the country’s
“first educator,” observed that blacks had disappeared as a social group, and that there were only
a few of them left.
As the nation-State was being built, the Argentine
ruling class (and others in the region) warned of
the presence of “others.” The response was to corner them and impose a vertical social structure.
The elites took on the responsibility of undermining these marginalized identities, which eventually became peripheral, resulting in the creation
of “historical alterities” (historical others in the
country’s history) narrated and contained within
a national context. The modern nation-State is
egalitarian in viewing marginalized communities.
Individuals are equal under nationality, as French
philosopher Étienne Balibar suggested, although
that ideal was not put into practice Afro-Argentines.
The final result is that Argentina boasts it is a
white nation; it is proudly the most whitened
country in South America.
Methods including extermination, intimidation,
concealment, and others were employed so that
no difference could threaten the Argentine collective that had been formed in the “racial melting
pot.”
Blacks were first ideologically erased, then expunged from the nation’s collective imagination
and memory. Even today, groups that look the
most European discriminate against those who do
not, or are farther from being so than others in
Latin America. National identity in modern States
required the whiteness of their inhabitants,
whether or not they had a non-white population.
Modernity considered the color white emblematic; it became synonymous with modernity.
Conversely, non-whiteness ended up being seen
as pre-modern and primitive. One only needs to
review the way the Western media presents Africa as a barbarous space inhabited entirely by
black population -- although there are whites.
Given these variables, which existed in all of
Latin America, it is logical to conclude that Argentina is a country that is proud of its European
roots. One might consider that its inhabitants “descended from ships” coming from southern Europe since the late nineteenth century, but another
type of ships had arrived earlier: a very different
kind, which sailed from numerous ports in Africa.

These were slave ships that left an important human cargo not only in the Río de la Plata regions,
but also in the interior of what would become Argentina in the future.
The first formal arrival took place in 1588, when
three blacks slaves ended up in Buenos Aires.
There was a constant shortage of workers at this
austral latitude, and since the city authorities
turned a blind eye to this problem, contraband became the norm. Many powerful men participated
in this enterprise, and slaves were one of the most
profitable products. By the early seventeenth century, Bueno Aires governor Hernandarias de Saavedra decreed an end to the annual arrival of
fifteen slave ships, each containing two thousand
slaves. Yet, the African population kept growing
as intensely as the trafficking. By 1778, the first
census of what would become Argentina showed
a population of 200,000, of whom 92,000 were
blacks and mulattoes (46%). In several provinces,
more than half of the population was “brown and
black.” Notwithstanding, the 1895 census reveals
only 454 Afro-Argentines among the country’s
four million inhabitants. This is when the myth of
their disappearance began, yet no one questioned
the validity of the official figures. This myth defends the idea that blacks were not able to leave
any mark because they were extinct in Argentina.
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